Modal liquid crystal wavefront corrector

Liquid crystal wavefront corrector on silicon

A reflective-type liquid crystal (LC) wavefront corrector with modal addressing is described. The corrector’s backplane has an array of pixel electrodes interconnected by a network of discrete resistors. The resistive network serves to form the local voltage profile that controls the phase distribution generated in the liquid crystal layer. This design is realized in a bipolar silicon technolog...

Liquid crystal wavefront corrector with modal response based on spreading of the electric field in a dielectric material.

A novel liquid crystal (LC) wavefront corrector with smooth modal influence functions is proposed and realized. The device consists of a thin layer of planar aligned nematic LC sandwiched between a glass plate with a conductive electrode and a plate made of ceramic material with a very high dielectric constant. Control electrodes are positioned on the back side of the ceramic plate, opposite to...

Liquid Crystal Wavefront Correctors

Multichannel liquid-crystal-based wave-front corrector with modal influence functions.

We report on a multichannel liquid-crystal-based wave-front corrector with smooth modal influence functions. The phase is controlled by application of spatially localized ac voltages to a distributed voltage divider formed by a liquid-crystal layer sandwiched between a high-conductance and a low-conductance electrode. The shape of the influence function depends on the control frequency and mate...

Wavefront sensor and wavefront corrector matching in adaptive optics.

Matching wavefront correctors and wavefront sensors by minimizing the condition number and mean wavefront variance is proposed. The particular cases of two continuous-sheet deformable mirrors and a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with square packing geometry are studied in the presence of photon noise, background noise and electronics noise. Optimal number of lenslets across each actuator are o...